Describe the Role of Situational and Dispositional Factors in Explaining Behavior

Describe the Role of Situational and Dispositional Factors in Explaining Behavior

Sophie Landesmann

The roles of situational and dispositional factors both play an important role in behavior. A significant term that one has to take in account is attribution, which is how people interpret and explain casual relationships in the social world. Humans have the need to know why things actually happen. Situational factors have something to do with external factors. When people speak about their own personal behavior they tend to attribute it to situational factors. Dispositional factors on the other hand have something to do with internal factors. When people observe the way other ones behave, they tend to ascribe it to dispositional factors. People use dispositional factors all the time for example, when a person is waiting for someone to meet them and they don’t arrive on time they think about different reasons why the person could be late and the behavior could be attributed to dispositional factors. The Theory of Attribution argues that people are more likely to explain a person’s actions by pointing to dispositional factors, rather than to the actual situation. When people overestimate the role of dispositional factors in a person’s behavior and underestimate the situational factors it is called the fundamental attribution error. People gather information by observing others, which can often lead to making unreasonable conclusions. For example, after watching several movies with Tom Cruise one might think that he is a hero and not afraid of anything, which would be dispositional, and not to the fact that he is only playing a role in these movies, which would be situational.

Psychologists often wonder why people make unreasonable conclusions like this and argue that it is, because people tend to think of themselves as adaptable and ever-changing human beings. When people look at others, they are not able to make a balanced decision, since they don’t have enough information about them so they attribute behavior to disposition. When thinking of the behavior that they themselves have, they tend to think that they would have acted another way under different conditions. A research study was made by Lee et al. in 1977, and her aim was to see if student participants would make the fundamental attribution error when they knew that all the actors were simply playing a role. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three different roles: a game show host, contestants on the game show, or members of the audience. The observers were asked to rank the intelligence of the people who had take part. They ranked the game show host as the most intelligent, even though the person had written the questions and was randomly assigned to this position. There are concerns about this experiment, one of which being that student samples are not representative of the greater population, and therefore it is questionable where the findings can be generalized.